


Hwīt

by fortunecookie



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: 4 times/1 time, Bennefrost - Freeform, M/M, aged up!Jamie, color theme, cute hair insecurity, illustrator!Jamie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-18 02:59:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/874882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortunecookie/pseuds/fortunecookie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hwīt: Old English for 'white'. Regnboga: Old English for 'rainbow'.</p><p>The four times Jack doesn't like his hair and the unanswered questions it presents, and the one time Jamie makes him change his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hwīt

**Author's Note:**

> Just to use Old English because of pre-immortal!Jack. (Not because of intense etmylogy feels, sheesh. Hehe.) :D Bennefrost at the end.
> 
> Disclaimer: ROTG is the property of the amazing Dreamworks Animation team! Much love but no claims here, guys. 
> 
> Enjoy, comment/constructive feedback, kudos if you can. Thanks!

Hwīt

The dank cold left a shiver crawling up his spine and he had a sweater and a cloak on, which was nice, but he felt like something had been ripped from his skull and hurled into space. He tried thinking of his name and the answer was as clear as a bell, but semi-automatic (like how he knew two times three was six but had no idea why) - Jack Frost. But thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Frost or Frost Junior? just muddled the ghosts knocking around his head. So he set his feet upon the icy ground, one bony leg at a time, his thin, lanky frame moving like a sliver shadow. 

Jack came across a clearing and he saw a pond. Suddenly thirsty, he knelt and drank the water with fervor. As he did he saw his own face reflected back in the moonlit water, rippling and shiny and - inhuman, he thought with a mixture of exhaustion, disbelief, and clarity. He was pale as the snow covering the oak wood and his eyes were too blue and too crystal for a boy who couldn't see his past or future. But what struck Jack the most was his hair. It was dirty and matted and most definitely white. 

He instinctively started and backed away. He felt the lightest of snowflakes landing on his hair and he took a breath and plunged his face into the water, gasping when he came up, gasping again when he saw that the white color remained the same. He didn't like it. He couldn't pinpoint what exactly was bothering him, but the hue was too bright and the night was too inviting and the cloak was around his shoulders, okay, so he drew it up and covered it for the next fifty years.

\---

Jack ditched the cloak after the rest of the world started wearing tee-shirts and jeans (and also maybe because Bunny had told him it made him look like the Grim Reaper, which was for Halloween only but it didn't sting as bad as the time Bunny called Manny a bigoted know-it-all for sending a no-good rebel without a cause down as an immortal winter spirit). The threadbare sweater went as well, in favor of a navy blue hoodie much like those Chicago slum kids, the cool ones with the hard lives but the tough talking. (Jack liked them. He sent snow days and snowstorms whenever he could.)

His white hair refused to stay flat and normal and brown but Jack figured it was leftover teen angst from whenever (from before?) and he didn't talk about it, didn't try to dye it back or whatever (could spirits even do that?), didn't have the sensation to rip it off or go skinhead style (was that what the L.A. kids in the army had said?) after a bit. 

He started allowing himself to go out without the hood securely over his head, even though he knew in the back of his head that since no-one could see him it was foolish to feel self-conscious about it in the first place.

\---

When Jack was maybe 200-something years old, he had met Sakura Blossom, the Japanese spring spirit, in Kyoto, where he was depositing some fresh frost. She'd immediately engaged him and smiled, her rosy cheeks complementing her jet black hair tied in a topknot. She wore a kimono made of delicate silk that rippled like pond water. She was maybe fourteen or so, and she had excitedly talked with him as apparently she hadn't met the European/American winter spirit yet. She was very polite and bubbly; and had a habit of covering her mouth after chuckling at one of his retellings of a sled ride or a particularly amazing snowdrop flower. She told him of the new buds and the hope the sakura blossoms represented to Japan; and she painstakingly designed every leaf and petal to fall on the Earth.

They drank green tea on top of one of her tree houses in the mountains. Jack liked the elevation there as it was cool for his comfort.

Jack was beginning to relax until she brought up his white hair. 

"Your hair is… white?" She tilted her head to the side to see it better.

Jack hide his inward grimace and gave a nonchalant "Yes, it's been that way since I became a spirit."

Sakura gave an uneasy smile. "Forgive me if I seem a bit frightened. You see, I was born very early, in the first few years of Japan's civilization. I … Many of the elderly spirits believe that a white-haired young one is bad luck."

Jack sipped his icy tea. "Because white hair comes in old age?"

"Yes, and because it represents the time of Moon, or the end of what is bright."

Thanks for the immortal reminder of the security I've lost, Man in the Moon, Jack thought.

"Do you believe this?"

Sakura smiled serenely, and sighed a bit. "I do not, but I say this only to warn you if other spirits come your way and are not friendly."

"Thank you for the tea and the advice, Sakura."

She bowed and gave a parting gesture. "May our paths cross at the next season the gods will it to be. I wish you good travels, Jack Frost."

Jack left Kyoto right after frosting over all he could. Sakura's well-wishing words lay flat to his burning ears.

\---

Jack was cruising around New York, decked out with snowballs and flying through the air like a wintertime Spiderman. He stopped by Central Park, one of his all-time favorite hangouts, and grinned when he saw a group of kids, maybe around fifth grade, all clad in parkas and building snow forts. He grinned every more when he noticed that one of the kids had white hair.

"Hey, kiddo," he said. "Interesting hairstyle, like mine." 

Jack jumped on top of a park bench and swung around the lamp posts, letting the extra padded snow rain down like manna. The kids shrieked and grabbed up armfuls to mold and throw across walls of ice.

Jack stopped smiling when he saw that the white-haired kid was standing stoically off to the side. He couldn't have been more than eleven years old, but the steely look on his face aged him. He wore a knitted too-long scarf, and it was wrapped tightly around his neck like one of Santa's bows. He wore oversized, budget sunglasses, the kind purchased by unprepared tourists at a convenience store in the summer. His nose was crooked, like the Hunchback of Notredame, and his knees looked knobby and frail. Suddenly Jack realized why the boy wasn't playing with the other kids - it wasn't so much that they isolated him, it was that his physical disabilities prevented him from joining in to the snowball extravaganza.

"Come on, John," a girl with blond hair said. From the way she nudged the boy's shoulder, it must have been an older sister's touch. "We can color in reindeers and stockings at home next to the fire, okay?"

John wordlessly clung on to his sister's hand as they made their way around the forts. A snowball landed near John's feet and he inspected it for a bit before kicking it shyly and hurrying to catch up to his sister.

Jack was relieved John hadn't cried or thrown a fit about not being able to play. Oddly, though, Jack almost felt as if he was the one being deprived of a childhood - he was saddened by this mysterious, white haired boy with an incapacity to throw and roll in the snow. He was leaving the park when a gust of conversation floated over to his ears…

"There's the Machulski children," one of the women sitting on the bench motioned over to the pair.

"Such a pity," the older woman on the bench sighed, picking at her fingernails, "Not only was is the boy always sick due to some medical condition, but he has albinism."

"I hear Ms. Machulski is raising money for an operation for his eyesight," another women offered.

"Really? How can we help?"

"You can donate old things for her garage sale and …" The moms nodded solemnly and watched their children play. It was the kind of half-sympathetic, half-scared sort of charity work that you did because you felt an undeniable gnawing of pity growing in your lungs.

Jack didn't stay to hear the rest of the mothers' plans. He sped off to look for the Machulski's home. Along the street, he saw Christmas lights and rosy, radiant cherubs singing ballads in store windows; as he went further he saw twinkling after-magic effects of Sandman's expectant gift-bearing dreams following every able-limbed boy and girl running after an older sibling or away from an impending snowball attack… Albinism. He wasn't a well-read boy, but Jack could read, at least, and he'd accidentally blown away pages of a dictionary from a school the other day. By coincidence, he'd seen the word and the definition intrigued him: "a person or animal having a congenital absence of pigment in the skin and hair (which are white) and the eyes (which are typically pink).". 

That night Jack left a multitude of the prettiest snow flowers growing around the sister's balcony, dotted with dainty leaves and spots of pink. He didn't know why the sister's small touch and her knowing eyes made him feel as much empathy for her as he felt for John. 

Jack left the boy a specially-fashioned, high-grade, snow-resistant and shock-absorbent pair of sleek white tinted glasses in his stocking, and brushed John's hair out of his unseeing eyes as he slept underneath his spinning mobile of stars. After Jack returned back to Burgess, he looked into the lake and saw how clearly the white marked both him and John.

\---

Regnboga

\---

By 2013, centuries of spirithood had diminished Jack's original stress on appearance. Jack didn't 'hate' his hair, as per the dictionary definition, but he did feel discomfort when it was noticed or distinguished. It wasn't that he was uncomfortable with his reflection. He'd gotten used to the luminosity a long time ago. And no one else could see him anyways, so it wasn't like it was being pointed out every five minutes. What bothered him was the unanswered questions that the hue suggested: why white, how, and if he was albino - when people could see him, if people could see him before - did he have an older sister like John's, did his mother organize community events for his health? 

White symbolized the moon, blankness, and renewal. It was the clean slate, the erasure, the freedom and the empty all at once. White could be black in the sense that it's just as cold and undiscovered.

But Jack never saw that white could be any other color in the entire spectrum until he met Jamie Bennett. 

Jamie would laugh when Jack tackled him in a snowball war, and he'd offhandedly mention, "Your hair's silver now."

He'd watch ghost movies with him in the cinema and giggle when the projector's dusty spiraling light was overhead, and say, "Your hair's golden now."

Kool Aid got in Jack's hair when they were drinking it outside for a picnic in (of all seasons) summer. "Your hair's red."

Painting made it blue. Rolling over the grassy hill - green. Watching sunset over the beach -orange. Popping yellow balloons at Sophie's birthday party - yellow. Playing with new dog with brown fur - brown. Freak science project involving beetroot - indigo (Jamie got a B+).

Jack wouldn't have noticed these hues at all had Jamie not been there to share every technicolor moment with him. When Jamie chose to be a book illustrator, the first published drawing he did was one of Jack Frost, resplendent in pale skin, sharp blue hoodie, brown pants, pink lips, and, yes, white hair. Jack had never saw water colors like Jamie's before, which made the white almost look - transcendent? It glittered. 

"How did you draw me like that?" Jack managed to get out.

Jamie swiveled his desk chair to face him better. "You like it?" He grinned, and Jack could see the kid underneath the stubble and the chiseled jaw.

"Yeah, it's awesome."

"I like the hair best of all."

"… Me too."

"You asked how I drew it, right? Well - I just drew what I saw."

Jack shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "My hair doesn't do that." 

"No," Jamie stood up from the chair and looked at him. "It's even more beautiful."

Jamie was a foot taller than Jack now, and now a solid two years older than the seventeen pre-college physique Jack was immortally stuck at. Jamie's hair was chocolate brown, standing up at all ends (he'd rolled out of bed today) and he had paint splatters all over his 'work clothes' (read: ratty Toy Story shirt and jogging pants). His face was forever boyish, like what Jack would imagine a (literally) cheekier, rounded-eared Peter Pan to look like. Jamie's eyes were better than northern lights - they were, in fact, Jack's lights.

Jack imagined kissing that promise of a face. He saw those years of friendship shine through centuries of loneliness, and he was scared of how bright Jamie made him feel. 

One look at Jamie and Jack knew he was just as hopeful and frightened. Their fingers found each other's - pale and warm.

The world didn't stop; piano love songs didn't burst forth from the radio, doves didn't fly from the zoo nearby, and their words all but died on the edges of their suddenly-dry throats, because there was nothing to say when all it came down to was those five times Jack hated his hair and the one time he strangely didn't

Jamie gave Jack this strangled half-smile, leaned in - and that gold pot at the end of the rainbow was found underneath white clouds and white snow.


End file.
